Sharing Personal Health and Fitness Data with Health Insurance Providers: An Empirical Study Considering Trust and Risk

Digital self-tracking with wearable devices and mobile applications is exceedingly popular. The arising data is not only crucial for individual use but also for parties of the healthcare segment. This paper focuses on German health insurance providers and their expanding call for clients’ personal health and fitness data in a highly complex and regulated environment. As clients need to be willing to share health-related information, an experimental study was conducted, consisting of different modes of reward-based insurance offerings. Trust and perceived risk were assessed as prominent psychological constructs, assessing participants’ willingness to share their personal information. Results show that examined factors such as company prominence or monetary incentives are scarcely influential. However, trust and perceived risk affect an individual’s willingness to share. Taking up the health insurance provider’s perspective, alternative aspects need to be considered to successfully gain consumer trust to collect the clients’ health and fitness information

Taking Advantage of Algorithmic Preference to Reduce Product Returns in E-Commerce

Reimbursement of repair costs is a way to motivate customers to keep defective products instead of returning them. However, there is no research-based guidance on how retailers should frame repair costs reimbursement offers in terms of who decides on the size of the reimbursement and makes the offer—an employee or a machine. To guide further IS research and suggest ways that help e-commerce businesses to improve repair costs reimbursement effectiveness to decrease product return rates, the present research draws on literature on offer sources and on insights from a qualitative and an experimental study. We find that artificial intelligence-based (vs. human-based) repair costs reimbursement offers promote fairness perceptions, which, in turn, affect important customer outcomes—the likelihood to accept the offer and digital negative word of mouth. The results can guide e-commerce businesses’ returns-prevention efforts and IS research

PERIPHERAL MOTIVATION AND CREATIVITY IN CONTROLLED PLATFORMS: AN ANALYISIS BASED ON FACEBOOK AND IPHONE APPLICATION DEVELOPERS

In this paper, we describe how intrinsic motivation, extrinsic motivation, and the willingness to take risks influence the activity of Facebook and iPhone application developers. Both Facebook and Apple utilise a platform business model but differ in terms of their openness towards external development. However, in any platform business model, a platform owner must encourage peripheral contributions to strengthen its market position. In this paper, we use a questionnaire to investigate the influence of different motivation structures on participation. In particular, we seek to answer the following basic questions: (1) How do voluntary developers differ from developers who are paid by professional firms in terms of their motivation? (2) How do developers working on applications for an open platform (e.g., Facebook) differ from developers working for a rather closed platform (e.g., iPhone)? (3) How does perceived support for creativity affect the motivation of a sponsored individual? We conclude by providing managerial implications and suggesting avenues for further research

Divide et Impera! The Role of Firms in Large Open Source Software Consortia

Previously literature on the role of firms in open source software (OSS) development is mainly based on qualitative data and case studies rather than on proper data sets. Research has shown that firms involved in OSS development generally face the challenge to balance the tension between the wish for external knowledge and the demand for control. As it is not entirely clear how firms deal with this tension the goal of the paper is to deepen the understanding of the use of external knowledge, especially in firm-driven OSS consortia. Based on a theoretical background a research design and resulting hypotheses were developed. The data set is based on an agglomeration of a specific firm-driven community and consists of 912 committers and 116 firms organized in 109 independent projects

Digitally co-created corporate social responsibility: Testing the effectiveness of “You decide, we donate” approaches

In a world with increasing consciousness of sustainable consumption, corporate social responsibility (CSR) continues to be a major factor in consumers’ purchase-related decision making. Recently, companies have started initiatives to provide digitally co-created CSR, in which consumers can decide to which project, organization or foundation a company donates. Despite early research efforts, still, less is known about the effectiveness of such approaches in terms of customer loyalty and whether or not consumer characteristics impact the effectiveness. To this end, we conducted a scenario-based experiment with 241 participants, in which we manipulated different forms of CSR activities, including a digitally co-created mode of corporate social responsibility that involves a “you decide, we donate approach”. We confirm the effectiveness of digitally co-created CSR and show that consumer innovativeness as a consumer characteristic has no moderating effect. We discuss implications for IS theory and practice as well as future research opportunities

A User-centered Perspective of mHealth: Understanding Patients’ Intentions to Use Mobile Video Consultation Services

Research has shown that the use of the mobile phone technology in combination with a web-based interface in health care could provide enormous benefits. In this work, we shed light on users’ acceptance of mHealth with the example of mobile video consultation with a doctor. Our quantitative study is based on a survey of 210 respondents. We draw on TAM, one of the most-used and often-cited concepts for explaining adoption behavior for newly introduced technologies and technical services. The results reveal that an interaction between personal innovativeness and perceived privacy risk has an effect on user’s perceived ease of use. The findings contribute to research by enhancing our understanding of mHealth adoption from a user’s acceptance perspective

Enemy in the house? Antecedents of employees’ company-related bad mouthing in social media

Given that company rating sites encourage employees to evaluate their company - which might lead to a loss of reputation -, this research focuses on identifying and quantifying the importance of antecedents of employees’ company-related bad mouthing in social media. Data for this study was collected through a qualitative interview study (N = 33) and a quantitative online survey approach (N = 472). Drawing on social identity theory and using the job demands-resources model as a theoretical lens, we found that job demands are positively associated with turnover intention, which in turn increases company-related bad mouthing in social media of employees. This study enriches the understanding of employees’ behavior in social media and provides implications for managers such that the strategy of reducing turnover intention is more successful to limit the amount of employees’ bad mouthing than enhancing employees’ commitment

Firm-sponsored developers in open source software projects: a social capital perspective

The way in which companies benefit from open source software (OSS) communities varies and corresponds with the business strategy they maintain. One way of establishing influence in OSS communities is by deploying own resources to an OSS project. Assigning own paid developers to work for an OSS project is a suitable means to influence project work. On the other hand, the pertinent literature on user communities and governance in OSS maintains that a large proportion of influence individuals have in a community depends on their position in the community. This view is reflected by social capital theory, which posits that strong relationships and network positions that are advantageous to access information are valuable resources that affect different downstream variables, most importantly value creation. Thus, this study aims to extend research that has used social capital theory to investigate online communities by testing a conceptual model of social capital and individual’s value creation and assessing the influence of firm-sponsorship on the context

PARTICIPATION AND CONTROL IN ONLINE COMMUNITIES: COMPARING THREE CASES OF USER INVOLVEMENT IN SERVICE NETWORKS

This paper aims at investigating three different scenarios of user involvement in service networks. In particular, we chose a heterogeneous network of small and medium sized enterprises (SME), where firms form the network and users are the employees of those firms, a health care network, where hospitals and physicians are institutional members of the network and the role of the ?user? is assumed by patients, and an open source service network (OSSN), where open source firms are institutional members of the network, and both employees of those firms as well as free developers may be considered ?users.? Based upon qualitative interviews we find transparency and perceptions of regulations and control to be important for institutional actors in service networks. As such, this study provides recommendations to service network managers and service network members that intend to make use of user?s knowledge by means of collaborative tools and online platforms

Service productivity:what stops service firms from measuring it?

Productivity measurement poses a challenge for service organizations. Conventional management wisdom holds that this challenge is rooted in the difficulty of accurately quantifying service inputs and outputs. Few service firms have adequate service productivity measurement (SPM) systems in place and implementing such systems may involve organizational transformation. Combining field interviews and literature-based insights, the authors develop a conceptual model of antecedents of SPM in service firms and test it using data from 276 service firms. Results indicate that one out of five antecedents affects the choice to use SPM, namely, the degree of service standardization. In addition, all five hypothesized antecedents and one additional antecedent (perceived appropriateness of the current SPM) predict the degree of SPM usage. In particular, the degree of SPM is positively influenced by the degree of service standardization, service customization, investments in service productivity gains, and the appropriateness of current service productivity measures. In turn, customer integration and the perceived difficulty of measuring service productivity negatively affect SPM. The fact that customer integration impedes actual measurement of service productivity is a surprising finding, given that customer integration is widely seen as a means to increase service productivity. The authors conclude with implications for service organizations and directions for research